
Glossary-10
PowerPC Microprocessor Family: The Bus Interface for 32-Bit Microprocessors
Set-associativity
. Aspect of cache organization in which the cache space is
divided into sections, called
sets
. The cache controller associates a
particular main memory address with the contents of a particular set,
or region, within the cache.
Significand
.
The component of a binary floating-point number that consists
of an explicit or implicit leading bit to the left of its implied binary
point and a fraction field to the right.
Slave
. The device addressed by a master device. The slave is identified in the
address tenure and is responsible for supplying or latching the
requested data for the master during the data tenure.
Snooping
. Monitoring addresses driven by a bus master to detect the need for
coherency actions.
Snoop push
. Write-backs due to a snoop hit. The block will transition to an
invalid or exclusive state.
Split
-
transaction
. A transaction with independent request and response
tenures.
Split-transaction bus
. A bus that allows address and data transactions from
different processors to occur independently.
Strong ordering
. A memory access model that requires exclusive access to
an address before making an update, to prevent another device from
using stale data.
Supervisor mode
. The privileged operation state. In supervisor mode,
software can access all control registers and can access the
supervisor memory space, among other privileged operations.
Synchronization.
A process to ensure that operations occur strictly
in order
.
See
Context synchronization and Execution synchronization.
Synchronous exception.
An
exception
that is generated by the execution of
a particular instruction or instruction sequence. There are two types
of synchronous exceptions,
precise
and
imprecise
.
System memory.
The physical memory available to a processor.